F1 Pit Stops Explained With the Records, the Technique and the Strategy

Our best pit stop in club endurance racing took fifty eight seconds. Fuel, driver change, film off the windshield, go. We practiced in a parking lot until the guy on the belts could do it blindfolded. At Roebling Road one July we executed it perfectly. We still lost two positions.

That is the part of Formula 1 pit stops nobody puts on the highlight reel. The two seconds are astonishing and they are also the easy part. What decides the race is when the call goes out, and what the driver finds when he rejoins. Rules below come from the FIA 2026 Sporting Regulations, times and records from Formula 1 and the DHL pit stop award.

What actually happens in those two seconds

Around twenty people work a Formula 1 stop, and most of them touch the car for less than a second and a half.

Three per corner, two on the jacks, two on the wings, several more watching and covering. The car arrives on its marks. Four guns run in parallel, the jacks drop, and a light tells the driver to go. Nobody refuels. That went away after 2009, which is why a modern stop is a tire change and nothing else.

The measured time is stationary time only. It starts when the car stops moving and ends when it moves again. The figure on television is a fraction of what the stop really costs.

The record, and the price of chasing it

The fastest stops, and this season for comparison

Stop	Team and driver	Time
Qatar 2023	McLaren, Lando Norris	1.80 seconds, the record
Brazil 2019	Red Bull, Max Verstappen	1.82 seconds
Azerbaijan 2016	Williams, Felipe Massa	1.92 seconds
Spain 2026	McLaren, Oscar Piastri	2.13 seconds, fastest of that weekend
Australia 2026	Mercedes, George Russell	2.17 seconds, fastest of that weekend
Stationary time only. Sources: Formula 1 and the DHL Fastest Pit Stop Award.

Stationary time only. Sources: Formula 1 and the DHL Fastest Pit Stop Award.

Nobody has gone under 1.80 seconds since Qatar in 2023, where Lando Norris came in and left again before most people had finished a sentence. Red Bull owned the mark before that at 1.82. Williams held it at 1.92.

Progress in this area has slowed to almost nothing. A tenth over a decade, roughly, and each new tenth costs more risk than the last.

This season the quick stops have settled a little higher. Mercedes managed 2.17 seconds in Australia. McLaren did 2.13 in Barcelona for Oscar Piastri. Ferrari took the DHL award for 2025 on consistency rather than one showpiece stop.

Chasing a record has a failure mode, and it is expensive. A gun that does not seat costs three seconds. A cross threaded nut costs a race.

The clock that matters runs longer

The rules around a pit stop in 2026

Rule	Detail
Refuelling	Banned after the 2009 season
Tire specifications	At least two different dry specifications in a dry race, one of them a mandatory race specification
Pit lane speed	80 kilometers an hour
Monaco	The 2025 three-set rule that forced two stops was removed for 2026
Unsafe release	Penalty for the team and the driver, decided by the stewards
Source: FIA 2026 Formula 1 Sporting Regulations, Issue 08, and FIA rule changes for 2026.

Source: FIA 2026 Formula 1 Sporting Regulations, Issue 08, and FIA rule changes for 2026.

The limit through the pit lane is 80 kilometers an hour, and the lane runs a long way. Entry, the slow trip past the garages, the stop itself, then the exit. Across a season the real cost of a visit lands somewhere near twenty seconds.

Which is why the decision matters more than the wheel guns. Twenty seconds against a driver who stays out is a gamble on tire life, traffic and whatever the safety car does next.

Strategy people talk about the undercut, stopping early to use fresh rubber on clear track. The overcut is the opposite, staying out while the other car loses time in the lane and on cold tires. Both work. Both fail. Traffic usually decides which.

Why anybody stops at all

The rules require it in dry conditions. Each driver must use at least two different specifications of dry-weather tires during a race, at least one of them a mandatory race specification. A dry Grand Prix cannot be run on one set.

Monaco got an experiment in 2025. Drivers had to use three sets and therefore stop twice. Teams gamed it by slowing the field for a teammate, the racing did not improve, and the clause was struck out of the 2026 rules.

Everything else is degradation. A tire gives up its best work in the first stint and then starts sliding, and the team is deciding when the sliding costs more than twenty seconds in the pit lane.

Where stops go wrong

Two ways, mostly. The crew releases a car into the path of another one, which brings a penalty, or a wheel goes on wrong and the car is stopped for safety.

Both of those happen in front of a camera pointed at the mechanics, which is unfair. The crew is executing a plan under a clock somebody else set.

I have had my own version. During an eight hour race I fumbled a belt buckle in the driver change and cost us fourteen seconds. Nobody said anything about it afterwards, which was worse than if they had.

Every season somebody emails me asking whether an F1 crew would beat a NASCAR crew. Different job, different tools, and the NASCAR guys are carrying fuel cans and a lug wrench while ours are not carrying anything at all. I have stopped answering, mostly because both sides of that argument arrive with charts.

What I watch during a stop

The pit wall, when the broadcast allows it. The decision is visible several laps before the stop, in whether a team is bringing the driver into traffic or into space.

Then the exit, because that is where the twenty seconds are settled. A car that rejoins behind a train has lost more than a slow gun would have cost.

And the lap after, which tells you whether the new tires were the right ones.

One more thing, and it has nothing to do with strategy. The best thing I have seen in a pit lane was a crew at a club enduro that kept a folding chair for their driver’s mother, set up between the timing stand and the wall, with a cooler next to it. She sat there for six hours and called out lap times that were wrong by about four seconds, and nobody corrected her once.

Back at Roebling Road